- Number of plays: 13
- Designer: Andy Clautice, Paul Dennen
- Artists: Clay Brooks, Anika Burrell, Derek Herring, Raul Ramos, Nate Storm, Alain Viesca
- Release Year: 2019
- Mechanics: Deck Building, Narrative Adventure, Pick up and Deliver, Legacy
Introduction
It’s kind of amazing how Legacy games rose and fall over the last decade. What started back in 2011 with Risk Legacy, and rose to provenance in 2015 with Pandemic Legacy: Season 1, there was a time when Legacy games were all the rage, when board game hobbyists were clamouring for more campaigns. Original games like Seafall and Charterstone promised a unique game experience instead of using a ‘tried and true’ existing game as their foundation. Ultimate Werewolf, Machi Koro, and Betrayal at House on the Hill all produced Legacy versions of their popular games.
If you were anything like me, we went from a dearth to a glut of half-finished campaigns. It turns out, committing to play the same game 12 – 24 times is actually quite a tall order. With 4 players, all of whom have different tastes, and new games always on the way, choosing to return to a Legacy game means not playing whatever new, exciting game for another week. And then one of your friends decides to start a board game blog, and is always pushing to play something new, so he can produce new content, and you’re left with boxes of half finished games on your shelf. What scum.
How to Play
Clank! is a deck building game, in which players are delving into a dangerous mine to steal the most valuable artifact they can get their hands on, then escape with their loot. Each player starts the game with a deck of 10 cards, containing some boots for movement, some burgle, that grants some skill, which allows you to buy new cards, and a two stumble cards, which simply produce the titular resource, clank.
As players play cards, acquire new cards, and move deeper into the dungeon, they will inevitably produce clank, which represents the noise you make. After buying cards from the market row to augment and power up your abilities, the new cards that come out may have a symbol that triggers the dragon to attack. When this happens, all the clank that has been produced gets swept up into a bag, then, some cubes are drawn. If your colour comes out, OUCH! It gets placed on your health bar, and should you ever reach 10 damage, you’re out of the game. As you and your fellow thieves manage to ransack the dungeon, the dragon will get angrier, and draw more cubes each time an attack happens. If you die while in the underground, you’re the dragon’s dinner. You don’t get the opportunity to score your points, and no one remembers your name. If you die while in the above ground, hurrah! The local villagers haul your maimed body to the inn, where you can recount your tale of danger. Even better, if you manage to return to the starting spot with an artifact in hand, you earn a bonus 20 points.
Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated takes this gameplay, and adds in some story beats. A narrative set in the Penny Arcade universe, with extra goals and bonus objectives that can help or hinder your party should you manage to complete, or fail to satisfy before the end of each game. As each game progresses, you’ll be tearing up contract cards, placing new location stickers on the board, augmenting cards, and adding bonuses to specific spots on the board. Each game will end with a winner, the player who earned the most points, and a Associate Spotlight, the player who managed to accomplish the objective set by the story at the start of the game.
Review
My experience playing Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated was a bit odd. We bought the game as a group and broke it out during our first Cabin-con. We played 4 games back to back, and I was utterly in love. There was so much discovery, so many things to sticker, branching paths in the narrative, I was deliriously enjoying the experience. The last game of that weekend saw my character at the bottom of the map while everyone else was nearly out, spelling an almost certain doom for me. I choose to accept my fate and push further to get the last story beat, which just so happened to reveal a genie, granting me a massive 20 point relic, and teleporting me out of the danger zone. That was one of the few games I won.
My goal while playing Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated was never to get the highest score. Instead, I always chased down what thought the associate spotlight award was going to be. I would beeline to the spots on the map that would have us reading from the book, I would eschew ‘good’ cards if they didn’t help me fulfill the available contracts. More than once, I sacrificed my game to satisfy my need for discovery.
Each play of Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated took between 2 and 3 hours. Every few turns there’s a new paragraph to be read, stickers to apply, and conditions to update. I loved it, but constantly having to stop, and read, and sticker utterly broke the flow of the game. In the latter half of the campaign, the discovery slowed down. A lot fewer stickers were being placed, only a handful of contracts were available, and the deck of cards left to unlock was gradually getting thinner. Even with the discovery elements waning, each game still managed to introduce new mechanics that would keep the game from getting stale.
After that first day where we played 4 games in a row, it took us a further year and half to finish the next 8 games. Every couple of months we’d break it out, need to re-learn the nuance of the legacy elements. None of us were major fans of the base game of Clank, which Acquisitions Incorporated was based off of, but we knew the gist. We’d often forget how some of the elements that were unlocked in our previous game worked, and we’d often forget the bonuses that we unlocked at our pub, because that board would be way off at the end of the table. Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated is a table hog, spanning the entire breadth of my average sized dining table, and still needing spare chairs for the boxes, books, and sticker sheets. Furthermore, we’d forget the nuance of how the shrines worked, or that we had to draw vault cards at the start of each mission. I suspect this wouldn’t have been a problem if we had less time between each games, but, when your game group priortizes new games over old ones as ours does, there’s only so much you can do. It weirdly felt like learning a new game, every time we sat down to play.
I don’t know if Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated is strictly better than the base game of Clank!. Now that we’re done, none of us feel compelled to keep the giant box that held everything. There’s literally a 0% chance one of us will want to play a ‘normal’ game of Clank! on that legacy board. At least with the base game (or one of the sequels that offer a spin on the main layout) I’d feel compelled to play with people who are new to the deck building genre of board games. Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated is a behemoth on the shelf, taking up too much space, and now that we’ve finished the story, there’s a dozen little rules that’d I’d have to teach that when introduced over time, aren’t too onerous, but when thrown in all at once, can be a bit overwhelming.
Luck and balance aren’t things that I want to harp on, as with every deck builder, there is some element of luck. Pulling enough boots at a critical moment, or getting just the right amount of skill points, allowing you to get a powerful card at the perfect time, isn’t something that can really be balanced for. The deck of cards that makes up the offer is thick. There are few duplicates in the deck, making the offer feel different every time. That said, it really sucks when someone manages to score an excellent combo of cards, letting them pull off amazing turns, whilst your turn is “move two spaces, get 3 skill points, produce one clank. Oh look, all the cards cost 4 or more, so I guess I’ll take another explore card.”
The narrative of Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated is funny. My friend, Bear did a fantastic job as the role of the narrator. Perfectly assuming the accents of various rogues and rapscallions. Even with humourous writing and a great narrator, the story didn’t really grip us. One disconnect I had, was that we were all members of the same crew, the titular Acquisitions Incorporated, but at no point is this a cooperative game. Several times the story nudged us in the direction of collaboration, such as not letting the opposing crew, the Dran Enterprises steal our clients, but there wasn’t any real push to collaborate, other than for the joy of the story. As a group of mechanically driven people, it wasn’t enough for us. For each of us, our goal was to win the game, and/or, get the highest score possible. Collaborating would generally be in direct conflict of that goal. More than once I was fusturated by the fact that the next story objective was way at the bottom of the map, so I had to choose between going after that story, or, escaping from the depths before the dragon took a chunk out of my hide. And, as soon as I commit to delving deep, someone would snag a relic, and players would start cycling the offer row, trying to trigger the dragon more and more, punishing me for my choice. It’s a great mechanic in the base game, but when Clank! Leagcy is trying to tell a story, it feels like it’s trying to play two tunes at the same time.
I’ve heard of a few people report that playing Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated was one of their absolute best board game experiences. And some who report that they basically played the game cooperatively, The whole table would work together so they could discover the absolute most that the game had to offer. Honestly, before embarking on this legacy game, I wasn’t a very big fan of Clank! in general. And as far as legacy games go, Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated had everything I want in a legacy game experience; a doublesided map to explore, tonnes of story, stickers, destroying cards, bringing new cards into the system, surprise twists, you name it. But the biggest detractor I felt is that we had to play Clank! 13 times, and had no clear indication what we were supposed to be doing. How you actually win the campaign wasn’t revealed until the entire campaign was over. I was always chasing the Associate Spotlight award, but, that was a self imposed goal. I had no idea what reward that would net me in the end. And honestly, that’s something that’s always really irked me and my game group. We like to know all the rules before we start playing, so, when we open a rulebook and see huge blank spaces to be filled in with new rules as we progress, it’s not something we actually enjoy.
One of our players admitted they weren’t having fun and bowed out halfway through the campaign, so Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated became the game that we played when that player wasn’t available for our regular game night. It took a year and half, but we actually finished it, which is more than I can say for almost every other Legacy game I’ve attempted. I’m happy that we completed the campaign, the experience was good, but I can’t say that it left me particularily satisfied. It’s not something that I would recommend to everyone. If you enjoy Clank!, this is a no brainer. It’s more of what you like, and an obligation to play it more frequently. But if you don’t have any strong feelings for Clank!, or, if you actively dislike it, Clank!: Legacy – Acquisitions Incorporated is not going to change your mind.
